Wonders of the Modern Business World

Perhaps you are familiar with the Library at Alexandria – at its peak, it boasted around 700,000 painstakingly acquired scrolls, making it the largest assembly of information in the ancient world. While the exact details of its demise are disputed, it is known that the last repository of its once-fabulous collection was destroyed at the end of the fourth century A.D. Naturally, while it was difficult to replace seven centuries of knowledge, it was important to try: in 1974, serious planning began for the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, which was inaugurated in 2002 near the site of the original library. It is estimated that it will take approximately eighty years to fill the state-of-the-art structure to capacity.

Odds are good that your business doesn’t have 1600 years to recover from disaster, or even eighty to get back on track. Data compiled by the Disaster Recovery Institute finds that the majority of businesses that are unable to quickly recover computer operations after experiencing a serious loss of critical data will fail within two years. Several things contribute to this unfortunate statistic:

• bad publicity
• loss of customer confidence
• loss of internal workflow
• loss of sales capability
• inability to process customer orders
• loss of cash flow
• high cost of manual restoration of critical databases

Many companies are aware of the need to back up their server and keep the tapes offsite. What they are not aware of is the depth of contemporary records management and the way it is used in not only disaster recovery, but in business efficiency, cost reduction, regulatory compliance, and an evolution into an eco-friendly paperless environment. Over the next few days, we’ll be exploring the world of ERM, ECM, BPM, and a whole host of other acronyms that mean nothing to you now, but could make a huge difference in your organization.